arthritis

In any physical activity, there is always the risk of acute injury - cuts, scrapes, bruises, and even broken bones are often par for the course. For some extreme sports like rock climbing, where you voluntarily drag your body hundreds of feet into the air on the side of a sheer rock wall, athletes are even willing to risk death. Me following up a 5.9 in Rumney, NH... probably not risking death. Those acute sports injuries can sometimes grab headlines, but people are increasingly becoming aware of the long-term consequences of physical stress on the body. Football and hokey players can…

A few years ago a brown friend of mine complained that there were all these diseases which non-white people were susceptible to at a higher rate (e.g., Type II Diabetes, hypertension, ateriosclerosis, etc.), perhaps the white race was really superior (or medical geneticists were entering into a conspiracy to prove that this was so). So with that, I point to a new PLoS Genetics paper, An African Ancestry-Specific Allele of CTLA4 Confers Protection against Rheumatoid Arthritis in African Americans: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune condition affecting the synovial membranes of…